The Fraunhofer Society (Fraunhofer Gesellschaft) has developed and demonstrated an over-the-air (OTA) wave-field synthesis system for the test and certification of GNSS (global navigation satellite system) receivers.
The system, said to be cost-effective, flexible and scalable, is based on hardware and software solutions from IZT. The demonstrated setup to test GNSS receivers represents a new approach in contrast to conventional methods that realistically emulates real-world scenarios under controllable and repeatable conditions. This enables the realistic comparison of receivers and algorithms.
The OTA test laboratory comprises a Spirent satellite signal emulator used as a signal source, several OTA channel emulators used for wave-field synthesis which are able to emulate any electromagnetic environment in an anechoic chamber, and several OTA illumination antennas.
The OTA channel emulators from IZT support eight input and 32 phase coherent output channels (up to 256 logical channels) in the frequency range of 1 to 6GHz, and provide the output signals to the OTA illumination antennas. The final extension of the system based on the IZT components will have 12 x 32 channels.
The new OTA approach enables realistic radio channel emulation taking into consideration multipath propagation, multi-frequency, and multi-user scenarios. It supports emulation of complex channel impulse responses of nearly unlimited length and can be applied for LTE and cognitive radio, sensor networks (including energy networks and smart metering) or Car-to-X (i.e. car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure) communications.
November 3, 2015
